The Ghost of Memory
Wilson Harris Faber & Faber, 200pp, £16.99
In an eloquent lecture delivered 30 years ago, the novelist Wilson Harris described the moment that shaped his writing career. While working as a government surveyor in his native Guyana, he went on many expeditions by river. On one occasion, the anchor of his boat got stuck in the riverbed. Strong rapids were about to capsize the boat, so the crew cut the anchor loose. Travelling in the same place three years later, their anchor got stuck again; but this time they managed, after strenuous tugging, to pull it free. When it was brought up, they found the anchor hooked to the one lost three years earlier. The symbolism of that moment - the idea that we are inescapably secured and dragged down by our pasts - inspired Harris to meld the myths of his pre-Columbian ancestors with those from Europe and Africa. "It is impossible to describe the kind of energy that rushed out of that constellation of images," said Harris. "I felt as if a canvas around my head was crowded with phantoms and figures."
The Ghost of Memory begins when a South American man is mistaken for a terrorist and shot in the back. At this point, however, the lucid action ends. The man falls into "a painting in a gallery in a Great City" and becomes one of its characters. He is confused, naturally, and touches a figure beside him. When fresh paint appears on his fingertips, he realises that he is not in a dream, or at least not completely so. He has become a "phantom assembly in the canvas of space sharing a knowledge of the devastations of nature". In other words, his ghost joins other victims of violence in the painting, which displays a universal history of man's destructive tendencies. Yet he is also reborn through the "womb of art . . . into the light of compassion"; for the symbolism of the painting, the man hopes, will "prove I was not a terrorist".
Perhaps he is a modern sacrifice? The policeman who shot him is compared to the Teotihuacán priests of ancient Mexico: "He used his gun as a tool for the good of mankind. His task or duty was dictated by the Sun which he defended in its material equivalents with fire, electricity, oil." Maybe he is an African trickster-figure, silenced for asking awkward questions: "What is pain, a universe of pain? Do fish suffer with a hook in their mouth . . . does the living earth groan in its arteries and veins?" His reflections are interrupted by a sceptical man called Columbus. They argue over a sculpture in the gallery: Giacometti's Standing Woman. It reminds the narrator of ancient Arawak designs, but Columbus denies any link between the Swiss sculptor and the tribe's "primitive relics". Columbus believes in a hierarchy of taste and a strict division between right and wrong, light and dark; he is an admirer of his namesake's colonial ventures. In the novel's final chapter, angered by his opponent's "shades of perception", he destroys the painting with his knife.
Harris is a complex but rarely elusive writer. His first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), is distinguished for its contradictory descriptions of landscape: a waterfall is "falling motionlessly", and a man stands like "melodramatic rock". These images capture the paradoxes of viewing nature - something continually moving can appear still, and something inert may be dramatic in scale or colour. His stories, despite their strangeness, usually blend the surreal with the real. In Palace of the Peacock, a crew of sailors inhabits the world of the living and the dead, while in Carnival (1985) a murdered man guides a friend through his life in early 20th-century Guyana.
In contrast, The Ghost of Memory detaches itself completely from the recognisable world. Harris's vivid descriptions once carried the reader through the thickets of his prose, but in this static gallery the drama comes from philosophical questions: "Is there a void in modern cultures?" "What is universal mind?" "Was Art mad or creative?" "Are you telling me that reality and unreality are an open door?" Harris's many previous novels have been praised for their brave blurring of boundaries between cultures and fictional forms. However, by abandoning compelling narrative, identifiable characters and coherent writing - all the features of his anchor story - Harris makes this new imaginative journey a struggle for his readers.
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